After experiencing one toom many distorted video calls on Zoom due to packet loss or other corruption, I started wondering if that distortion could be used intentionally for artistic effect. So, with Pillow and a few other Python libraries for bit-level data modification, I created Bitbot, a utility that deletes/distorts random portions of a file. I’ve found that it works best on JPG images, as the compression format plays well with the random distortion and the files can (usually) still be opened and recovered.

I have found that to upload/display these images anywhere, they usually need to be re-encoded by some image editing software so that they can be displayed properly. Below are some examples of photos I distorted with this tool. If you’d like to try it out, the source code is available over on GitHub!

Distorted goblin .gif